Daily Writing

One of the things I wrestle with is how to get in more writing practice. There isn’t enough time to spend with mini-lessons and practice unless we’re working on a writing unit, but I want kids to be doing some kind of writing each day, with the idea that doing a little bit each day will make it easier when we need to do the longer projects.

So two years ago, I decided to start each class period with five minutes of writing. The kids would come in (I was teaching three sections of reading and writing that year), get out their notebooks, and get started. I told them to start out by writing three sentences, and that they could always do more. They could write about whatever they wanted - fiction, nonfiction, just something they were interested in.

This seemed to be working fine until I started looking more closely at what they were actually doing. I’m sure three-fourths of them were doing something helpful, but then I stopped at M’s desk and this is what she had written: “I like cats. I like mom. I like dad.” A grand total of nine words, and most of them were repeats. I looked at her and said, “Can’t you do a bit more?” And she gave me a smile and said, “You said we only had to write three sentences.” I smiled weakly back, and immediately started thinking about how to change things up so that this fourth grader would be pushed to do more.

The next day, the assignment changed from writing three sentences to writing at least twenty words. I didn’t care how many sentences, I just wanted twenty words in sentences (I had to make that clear when a few kids just wanted to write the shortest word they could find twenty times). This generally improved things, and from then on, I upped the word count by five each month, until we were at fifty words in five minutes.

Around March, when we began to do some test prep, I found out that nobody could remember what a metaphor or simile was, as we had covered all of that in September. I panicked a little, but then I decided to roll some of that practice into the daily writing. On Monday, their writing needed to include a simile, on Tuesday a metaphor, Wednesday alliteration, Thursday personification, and Friday onomatopoeia. I made sure I had some kids share out each day so we could hear examples of each.  That weekly practice did help solidify the meanings of figurative language for most students, and it got them to remember to use them in other kinds of writing.

Last year I started with fifteen words in September, and even the most reluctant writers could generally accomplish that in five minutes.  As soon as I had taught similes, etc…, I incorporated that as part of their daily writing, instead of waiting until March.  We increased the total by five words a month, and most kids were able to easily do that amount and more. Many enjoyed the ability to write about whatever they wanted, but I still struggled with those students who had to be prodded every single day to get started.

This year I will do the same thing, but as the year goes on I want to add some simple revision practice in there as well. I might tell them to try and start a sentence with a verb, or find a place where they can cross out a word and use a different word. In my head this should only take five minutes, but in reality it will probably be closer to ten. 

I think that short, daily practice will hopefully translate to the longer writing that we do. Are there daily writing strategies that you have been successful with?